Kyla Houbolt, "On Not Writing"

Greetings all! Hope you're staying cool. This summer isn't as brutal as it could be yet but I'm feeling it.

I'm reading Naomi Klein's Doppelganger and I can't recommend it enough. The book reflects deeply on how neoliberalism and associated phenomena encourage a split self. How, for example, if you create a personal brand, you've created an identity you or someone else aspiring to the same can inhabit. Often I feel it is a struggle to cultivate openness about the psychic consequences of this society and economy. One of Doppelganger's achievements is that it goes far beyond mere openness. It is able to identify psychological manipulation and self-delusion in a number of corners we haven't cared to look at, much less clean.

John Oliver on Project 2025

Of course, why should we be concerned with the hidden forces threatening us when we can't deal with what's right in front of us? Someone told me earlier this week that Trump's second term wouldn't be too bad. He said Trump talks a big game but barely did anything last time. I had to hold my tongue. A number of those I've taught have seen their loved ones abused on account of immigration issues.

Anyway, that guy needs to get a clue fast. The plans for a massive deportation and policing force have been written in detail and explained aloud to audiences. There are venues where the proposed deportation of 15 million people is getting cheers. I think Oliver's show on the consequences of Trump 2 is very good: he discusses how complete control of the executive branch by the President's loyalists means, practically speaking, the marginalization of Congress. The FDA can simply declare abortion drugs or contraceptives unsafe and ban them; excessively brutal and unjust forms of policing can proliferate; scientists, teachers, journalists, dissidents, marginalized populations will be subject to the whims of political appointees as opposed to career civil servants. Laws are going to be far less of a thing than they are now.

I don't really know how to explain to someone that checks and balances are good and authoritarianism is bad. At some point, you'd think people would want to know what they're talking about. Like, isn't being wrong at least somewhat shameful?

Kyla Houbolt, "On Not Writing"

A wasp rises to its papery
nest under the eaves
where it daubs

at the gray shape,
but seems unable
to enter its own house.

-- Jane Kenyon, "Not Writing"

Kyla Houbolt calls forth moments when words overwhelm. "My eyes are thick with words. / ...I need more time... / to clear the words from my eyes / so I can see again." Right away, you might think this is only a problem for a few. I spoke to someone today who talked so much that they forgot what they said every other sentence. That words have weight, that weight pressures the eyes, and that we may not be able to see because of the overwhelming importance of verbal chaos–this seems so remote from a world where I'm talking with Airpods in my ears while watching YouTube with the television on in the background.

On Not Writing (from the poet's bluesky)
Kyla Houbolt

My eyes are thick with words.
The sun on leaves in the wind and
reflecting in the dusty mirror and
then shadow dancing on the wall
-- I need more time with the leaves
to clear the words from my eyes
so I can see again.

It stands to reason what words are so important they blind us. Many are traumatized by the news, as it deploys ones which constantly challenge our sanity. When I hear about "genocide" or "juvenile detention," I'm forced to confront that the most minimal moral standard I thought we could agree on–that it isn't a good thing to hurt children–has either disappeared or been twisted monstrously by conspiracy theorists.

That, I believe, is words at their worst, causing every drop of faith in humanity to hemorrhage. There's talk about writer's block not being real which I tend to agree with. After all, most times you have to try and write something, or read until you have to respond. However, I don't think it's appropriate to write in all circumstances. We are most certainly in a time of stupefied awe, where the best lack all conviction and it stuns to see the ceremony of innocence drowned right in front of you. The social experiments of Heath Ledger's Joker, e.g. blowing up hospitals, pitting prisoners and hostages against each other, are our daily bread.

Is there a remedy? I'm not sure, but Houbolt's picture of solace sounds right. The sun falls on wind-blown leaves; all this reflects in a "dusty mirror;" shadows dance on the wall. Broadly, I interpret this as the triumph of the natural world over our artifice, i.e. words. The most taxing words are a play for power. Death and abuse and carelessness are how many understand power, and they want you to accept the verbiage they deploy for their cruelty. Here, though, in the house, nature finds a way in. The sun gives light, the wind gives motion, and through a mirror a shadowy kaleidoscope appears on the wall. The interplay of the natural world and our shelter built against it suggests purposes, even another language, we haven't conceived. Sometimes we don't write because we're seeing, listening.